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F15/138

I would like to know how many times computers on the council network were blocked from visiting websites, with four individual figures given for the years 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 so far or for the equivalent financial years.

I would then like the figures for each year subdivided according to the reasons the websites were blocked, i.e. pornographic content, television streaming, gambling etc.

I would like any websites which council computers were prevented from accessing due to pornographic/adult content or tasteless material to be identified. A web address will suffice.

Finally, I would like the council to identify which web addresses, excluding the council's website or other internal pages, are the top ten most visited on its network over the past four years (2012, 13, 14 and 15) with the number of hits for each.

Request Date

11 March 2015

Requested by

Media

Released Date

1 April 2015

Response

Before setting out the information that is available in response to this request I would like to explain that the management information available from the current web filtering monitoring tool used by the Council is very limited. We also have serious concerns about its accuracy. The system is due to be replaced very soon.

The request was for data covering 2012-2015. The system logs overwrite data and as a result data is only available from 2014 onwards.

The data available from the tool in the first two tabs of the attached spreadsheet (downloads section below) suggests that there were 898,844 blocked sites in 2015 to date and that there were 1,497,323 sites blocked in 2014. This data is very suspect but is the only data available from the system.

The data on tabs 3 and 4 sets out the data we have available from the monitoring tool by the categories available on the system for 2014 and 2015 respectively. The system does not allow us to produce a list of the individual web addresses that were blocked.

The system does not allow us to produce a top ten list of the most visited sites.